Field

South and Southeast Asia, Europe, World

Research Interests

Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Professor and Irving and Jean Stone Endowed Chair in Social Sciences, joined UCLA in 2004. Educated at the University of Delhi and more particularly the Delhi School of Economics, the first decade of his working career was spent (with brief interruptions) teaching economic history and comparative economic development at the Delhi School of Economics, where he was named Professor of Economic History (1993-95). Thereafter, Subrahmanyam taught at Paris from 1995 to 2002 as Directeur d’études in the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, holding a position on the economic and social history of early modern India and the Indian Ocean world.

In 2002, Subrahmanyam was appointed as the first holder of the newly created Chair in Indian History and Culture at the University of Oxford, a position he held for two years before moving to a chair in UCLA. From July 2005 to June 2011, he served as founding Director of UCLA's Center for India and South Asia.

In UCLA, Sanjay Subrahmanyam teaches courses on medieval and early modern South Asian and Indian Ocean history; the history of European expansion, the comparative history of early modern empires, and world history. He advises graduate students on Indian history, the history of the Iberian empires, and more generally on forms of "connected histories". He was Joint Managing Editor of the Indian Economic and Social History Review for over a decade, besides serving on the boards of a number of other journals in the US, UK, France, Portugal, and elsewhere.

In 2013, Sanjay Subrahmanyam was elected to a Chair in Early Modern Global History at the Collège de France in Paris, and delivered lectures there over the year 2013-14 (see link).

He is currently working on a book on European constructions of India between 1500 and 1800, seen through the prism of collection, as well as a joint work on Indo-Persian first-person narratives with Muzaffar Alam (Chicago). He is also co-editor of Volume VI of the forthcoming Cambridge World History (2015).

Alongside our existing 12 sub-fields, the History Department supports a number of cross-field clusters. The clusters are intended to attract students and faculty to important themes and current in the historical discipline. The clusters will offer new courses, sponsor outside speakers, and convene Department-based workshops and seminars.